Supertanskiii and retaliation
Posted: Fri Sep 12, 2025 7:49 am
The world is full of double standards. Colonial violence was celebrated as the march of civilization, but when it came back at the metropole it was suddenly barbarism. What the video about Charlie Kirk hints at is exactly this hypocrisy: violence is judged not by its nature but by who commits it. Larry May, in his work on genocide, would recognize this pattern. He insists that the crime is not simply killing but the deliberate destruction of the social identity of a group. Groups are made fragile by how they are seen, defined, and stripped of recognition. To be made into a scapegoat is already to suffer a kind of social death.
The radical media world Kirk helped build resembles the structures May analyzed in Rwanda. Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines poured hate into the airwaves, a background hum that made violence seem not only possible but inevitable. May argued that such incitement is not innocent talk; it is a crime in its own right because it manufactures the conditions for atrocity. The Turning Point strategy of memes and soundbites, the sly framing of minorities as threats, follows the same logic: create suspicion, erode dignity, isolate communities until they seem expendable.
The responsibility does not lie only with those who commit acts of violence. It stretches outwards, into the networks of complicity. May describes this in legal terms: aiding, abetting, instigating. The video describes it in the language of culture wars, TikTok feeds, and donor networks. Both point to the same conclusion: leaders and broadcasters shape the emotional climate, and the violence that follows cannot be disentangled from the rhetoric that preceded it.
Yet the danger is not only in words but in the predictable cycle they unleash. The video insists that violence breeds retaliation, that those denied recognition will eventually strike back, while May warns against accepting retaliation as natural or inevitable. For him, cycles of vengeance corrode the very possibility of justice. The answer cannot be private acts of violence but collective legal processes that hold instigators to account. Still, the resonance remains: when social identity is stripped away and groups are made into objects of fear, the ground is laid for catastrophe. What we call politics is often just the management of who gets to count as fully human. And in the shadows of that management, hatred mutates into something far more dangerous.
The radical media world Kirk helped build resembles the structures May analyzed in Rwanda. Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines poured hate into the airwaves, a background hum that made violence seem not only possible but inevitable. May argued that such incitement is not innocent talk; it is a crime in its own right because it manufactures the conditions for atrocity. The Turning Point strategy of memes and soundbites, the sly framing of minorities as threats, follows the same logic: create suspicion, erode dignity, isolate communities until they seem expendable.
The responsibility does not lie only with those who commit acts of violence. It stretches outwards, into the networks of complicity. May describes this in legal terms: aiding, abetting, instigating. The video describes it in the language of culture wars, TikTok feeds, and donor networks. Both point to the same conclusion: leaders and broadcasters shape the emotional climate, and the violence that follows cannot be disentangled from the rhetoric that preceded it.
Yet the danger is not only in words but in the predictable cycle they unleash. The video insists that violence breeds retaliation, that those denied recognition will eventually strike back, while May warns against accepting retaliation as natural or inevitable. For him, cycles of vengeance corrode the very possibility of justice. The answer cannot be private acts of violence but collective legal processes that hold instigators to account. Still, the resonance remains: when social identity is stripped away and groups are made into objects of fear, the ground is laid for catastrophe. What we call politics is often just the management of who gets to count as fully human. And in the shadows of that management, hatred mutates into something far more dangerous.